Miley Cyrus’s Quest for Realness

“Yeah, I smoke pot / Yeah, I love peace” is how Miley Cyrus opens her new record, “Miley Cyrus and the Dead Petz.” Her burly, overfed voice is soon placed in chorus with itself: “Do it! Do it!” she encourages. As far as declarations of autonomy go, this is lamentably low-stakes. Cyrus’s defensiveness is unfounded, nearly aspirational, a tirade against some internally conjured enemy who hates weed, hates peace. It’s a rebellion against a status quo so unrecognizable as not to register.

Elsewhere, Cyrus has been a catalyst—her Happy Hippie Foundation has brought crucial notice to the struggles of homeless L.G.B.T.Q. kids. But, as the host of the MTV Video Music Awards on Sunday night—a pageant it is impossible not to feel too old to be watching; somehow, we are each born too old ever to be caught watching it—Cyrus presented herself more like a teen left alone for the first time than as an agent of insurrection. Her gleefulness felt genuine—endearing, even—but her politicking, limp.

The real destabilizing act on Sunday was—has always been—the spontaneous exhibition of vulnerability: Justin Bieber squinting back tears after completing an aerial dance routine (the child, he is fleet of foot!), his face crumpled and small, like a mole creeping timidly into a circle of daylight. Or Kanye West in a square, cardboard-colored T-shirt, hollering away his past indiscretions: “I just wanted people to like me more!” (Feel you, bro.)

The reigning neurosis of 2015—Is this real? This, what I’m seeing, is real?—made the Video Music Awards feel like an overcostumed poker match organized by a cabal of very rich, very careless people. Who was bluffing the hardest to relieve us of our cash? Pop music has always been a charade of one sort or another, and separating practiced performance from the spontaneous expression of feeling is a fool’s errand in this arena. But somehow the question of veracity has never felt more urgent. Every time self-professed regular gal Taylor Swift strode toward the podium—preternaturally poised, bloodless, her golden midriff pulled taut, like plastic wrap stretched across a bowl—thousands of heads tilted, wondering: Is the joke on me? This, is this a joke? Is it on me?

Over the past several years, Miley Cyrus has struggled to establish credibility as a harbinger of seditiousness, as a pop singer unlike other pop singers, as a flash of truth in a sky speckled with dummy stars. The ambition here is Cosmic Underdog: a blissed-out, spirited, live-and-let-live scamp pogoing through Los Angeles, insisting upon justice, insisting upon total candor, insisting upon—in the parlance of the day—endless, unmediated “realness.”

Cyrus earned her fame playing the shiny-haired title character on “Hannah Montana,” a laugh-tracked sitcom that ran on the Disney Channel from 2006 to 2011. After “Hannah Montana” ended, Cyrus began the familiar process of distancing herself from the show’s wholesome protagonist. Over time, her rebellion became grander and more obtuse—provocative ensembles led to visible tattoos, which led to the triumphant public consumption of alcohol, which segued into suggestive choreography, which morphed into the onstage simulation of various sex acts—but the goalposts were moving, too. Post-Lady Gaga, sartorial experimentation no longer even rated. A parade of increasingly outrageous outfits warranted yawns. Drugs, eh.

After a handful of missteps, some of which felt naïve, if not odious—her appropriation of African-American tropes has enraged those who feel that she’s not entitled to mine that material; at the V.M.A.s, she used the word “mammy,” startlingly, in a dopey skit with Snoop Dogg—Cyrus stumbled upon an oddball sensei: Wayne Coyne, the singer and songwriter behind the Oklahoma-based psychedelic-pop band the Flaming Lips.

That Coyne would be the figure to catapult Cyrus into a new orbit of “realness” is, for anyone who came of age in the early nineties, curious. Theirs is an improbable pairing. In 1993, the Lips had a modern-rock hit with “She Don’t Use Jelly,” a warbled, impish pop song from the group's sixth album. It is at least partially about a woman who butters her toast with gobs of Vaseline, and it was at least partially hoisted onto the charts via a memorable cameo on “Beavis and Butt-head.” (“Uh oh. I think this is college music,” Butt-head worried.) Mostly it is joyfully nonsensical, the kind of thing that a child might make up if you fed her too many graham crackers and took all of her toys away. In 1997, the band released “Zaireeka,” a four-CD album in which all four discs were intended for simultaneous broadcast on separate CD players. The band became critical sweethearts in 1999 with “The Soft Bulletin,” which was repeatedly compared to “Pet Sounds,” and again in 2002 with “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots,” a record about heartache and mortality. None of these bona fides seemed to indicate an imminent partnership with a colossally famous sitcom star turned pop singer.

And yet. The origins of their friendship are uninteresting: a tweet, a string of jubilant emoji, Instagram. To be honest, it seems like they simply liked each other—that they enjoyed a strange, instinctive rapport. Eventually, Coyne changed Miley. That’s presumptuous to say, and perhaps disempowering, but there is a clear demarcation: Cyrus before Coyne, Cyrus later. It’s O.K. Sometimes people transform us, thwart the trajectory. We are different after.

Cyrus has since embraced the Lips’s iconography, adopting bubbles, streaks of neon. She regularly affixes a cornucopia of absurdist accessories to her body. She has wiggled into a hot-dog suit and joined the Lips onstage for a show. At the 2014 Billboard Music Awards, she and Coyne performed a lush, blustery iteration of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” Coyne was wearing a deliberately placed puff of tinsel. Its generously styled tendrils swung down—far—between his legs. Cyrus wore a glittering cloak that made her resemble a tropical bird. On Twitter, Cyrus’s fans accused Coyne of being “on so much meth” and “a stupid old man.” (He is fifty-four; she is twenty-two.) It didn’t matter. They were partners.

At the V.M.A.s, that partnership was again put on display. Cyrus performed “Dooo It!” backed by a troupe of drag queens; halfway through her performance, Coyne crept up behind her and launched a rocket of confetti from a bong-shaped device that he lodged in her crotch.

Shortly thereafter, “Miley Cyrus and the Dead Petz” was placed on SoundCloud, where it could be streamed, in its entirety, for free. Coyne co-wrote “Dooo It!” and produced much of the record, and it is evident that it was important to Cyrus that he be there for the first announcement of its existence. That gesture of friendship—a union that’s as earnest and symbiotic at it is flummoxing—trumped Cyrus’s sexual peacocking and endless pot references. It was, in many ways, the most authentically subversive moment of the evening.

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The Busker

When he was sixteen years old, Gabriel Mayers hoped to impress a crush by teaching himself to play Nirvana’s “Come as You Are” on the acoustic guitar. Now twenty-seven, Mayers makes his living as a busker in the New York City subway system.